The bewilderments of egosearching

I don’t egosearch all that much–not because my ego isn’t plenty large enough, but because the main search engines tend to favor older material, date limits don’t work very well, and between me, Walt Crawford Kelly (of Pogo fame), an ornithologist in the midwest, and a baseball player, “Walt Crawford” is well past the visibility limit–which is to say, I generally wouldn’t see new items if there were any.

The blog search engines are a little different story, and I checked Technorati today (not for this blog, which stays handily in the “top 100,000 but far away from the top 10,000” middle, but for my name in quotes), and ran into a few oddities.
Including this one from May 2006, citing a “disContent” column.

The odd part comes in some of the comments. You get one person swallowing the NEA “reading at risk” line and extending it to non-reading in general. You get another making “my point” for me (for most people, for most books, ebooks are a solution in search of a problem–but don’t forget the for most people, for most books part of that!).

And then you get this:

“Nor do most people care about changing fonts, darkening type, etc… “. Just wait until you’re 60. You’ll care a lot!

Hmm. I’m 61. I don’t care about changing fonts, darkening type, etc. for me, for books, for now. Which isn’t to say that someone else might not. But as baldly stated, it’s another false universalism: “You’re old, so you need large type.”

A later comment, from someone ten years my senior, makes much the same point–and also points out that people on this particular forum are atypical enough that they sometimes need a reality check. And aren’t we all, in some area or another?

Whoops. There’s another one: It’s so easy to make false generalizations.

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